"'These great people like MacDiarmid are a bit scary,' says the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead. And Kathleen Jamie: 'Drunk? Men? Thistle? What?...No. No, not for me.'" "It was not ever thus. Dlyan Thomas declared: 'Every door in any town should be wide open to that great lyric poet Hugh MacDiarmid.' Sean O'Casey was of a like mind: 'Lord God, this fellow is a poet, singing a song even when pain seizes him, or the woe of the world murmurs in his heart'; and Yeats wrote to him to say, 'You have done many lovely and passionate things.' His beloved sparring partner Norman MacCaig issued a warning; 'Watch him, an angel's set his tongue on fire.'" The extraordinary man he was, brilliant, volatile, deeply prejudiced, deeply generous, emerges most compellingly in his letters. There have been previous collections but none so essential as this, composed exclusively of letters not previously published in volume form and drawn from his long and controversial life. Among the three editors is his own grandson, Dorian Grieve.